The body as plastic medium
Ida's embodiment doctrine begins with a physical claim about the material she works on. The body, she insists, is not fixed. It is plastic — in the technical, physics-laboratory sense of a medium that can be distorted by pressure and returned to a new shape, provided its elasticity has not been exceeded. This is the starting premise from which every later claim about thought, image, consciousness, and selfhood follows. If the body were not plastic, embodiment would be a sentence: you would be stuck inside whatever was given to you at birth. Because it is plastic, embodiment becomes a question of authorship. In her 1974 Healing Arts lecture, with Valerie Hunt and Julian Silverman in the room, Ida builds this premise carefully, naming the historical resistance to it — twenty-five years ago no one would have believed it, fifty years ago she would have been institutionalized for saying it — and then states the claim in full.
"All schools of body mechanics teach this measuring stick and verticality, but no other school of body mechanics teaches how to achieve it. But because the body has an unforeseen, unexpected quality, it can be done. The body is a plastic medium. Now this is incredible, and twenty five years ago, no one would have believed this statement. Fifty years ago, they'd have put me in a nice sunny southern room. You've given me pretty good care, maybe. But the body is a plastic medium, and you're going to hear that several times before we get out of here today. Now, we are ready to define rolfing structural integration."
Ida to the 1974 Healing Arts audience, after laying out the vertical line and before defining Structural Integration:
What plasticity makes possible is structural change, but Ida is careful to specify the mechanism. The body is plastic because it is not a unit. It is an aggregate — head, thorax, pelvis, legs — held in relation by the myofascial body, the connective tissue web. Embodiment, then, is not a vague feeling of presence but a specific structural fact: the relationship of the segments to one another and to the gravitational field. The collagen molecule is the operative unit. Energy, in the form of the practitioner's pressure, alters the ratios of the inorganic bonds holding the collagen braid together, and the joint becomes more resilient. This is the physics of getting into a body that was previously closed.
"Two factors contribute to this: the first that the body, seemingly a unit, is in fact not a unit but a consolidation of large segments: the head, the thorax, the pelvis, the legs. The relation of these segments can be changed because the connecting myofascial structure is a structure of connective tissue of collagen. This is what that myofascial body is about. And collagen is a unique protein. The collagen molecule is a very large protein and it is a braiding of three strands a special braiding. These three strands are connected by various inorganic hydrogen sometimes, sodium sometimes, calcium sometimes, and undoubtedly other minerals. These minerals are interchangeable within limits."
Ida, in the same Healing Arts lecture, naming the chemistry beneath the plasticity:
The same Healing Arts week gave Ida the occasion to name what the body actually is once you stop thinking of it as a chemistry factory. The factory machinery — the organs, the enzymes, the circulating fluids — does its work, but what holds it all together in three-dimensional space is the fascial body. She used a child's illusion to make the point: scoop the orange out of its peel, press the two halves of the rind back together, and the child takes some time to discover that the orange is a ball of skin. The human equivalent is the fascial body — the supportive web that, in theory, could be left standing if the chemistry were scooped out.
"factory go, but fascia is the stuff that keeps it from falling in on itself, falling in on its face, keeps you from falling on your face. It is your fascial body that supports you, relates you, and you know as with a child, you fool them sometimes by scooping out the material of the orange and leaving the skin and then putting the two heads together and you say to the kid now this is this is an orange and you see how long it takes that young ster to find out that it isn't an orange, that hits a ball of fascia. And so with with a a human being, in theory at least, you could scoop out the stuff that makes the factory go, the chemicals and so forth, and you would have left this supportive body of fascia. And it is this body which has had very little, almost no exploration in the sense that we have been giving to it."
Ida at the 1974 Healing Arts conference, naming what the body is once the chemistry is set aside:
Thought creates body
Once the body is established as plastic, Ida takes the second step — the one that distinguishes her from every other manipulative school of her century. The body is not merely shapeable by external pressure; it is continuously shaped by the inhabitant's own thought and inner conception. This is the strongest claim in her embodiment doctrine and the one she states most directly in the 1974 Open Universe class, contrasting the rigid body-images produced by sports and exercise with what Structural Integration is actually doing. Exercises, she says, build strong bodies and rigid body images — task-oriented, closed-system, a limited number of potential responses. The newer approach refuses that closure.
"is the physical body is created by you at any moment and at any time and it is the direct result of your thought and it's the direct result of the inner conception of what you are."
Ida in the 1974 Open Universe class, after contrasting exercise-built bodies with what Structural Integration evokes:
The corollary follows immediately: if the body is the direct result of the inner conception, then the work of changing the body is, in part, the work of changing the inner conception. This is why Ida refuses the alibi — *I inherited this lousy body and I really don't have to have any responsibility for it.* The plasticity of the medium and the authorship of the inhabitant are linked. You cannot have one without the other. And what the practice does, in her formulation, is intervene at the structural level in a way that lets the inner conception update itself. She continues:
"Now if we ever took that approach and said, The physical body is created by you at any moment and it is the direct result of your inner conception of what you are. Now, rolfing changes what you are, the conception of what you are. And through it, it changes the nature of the body itself. If we had the concept that electrodynamic, electrochemical changes were ever taking place and were moving in pace with your thoughts, Look what we're saying about developing the human body. That your body is not beautiful or ugly or healthy or deformed or swift or slow simply because it's thrust upon you like this at birth. See this is a fine way to get away from it."
Ida, continuing the same passage, drawing the consequence for how the body is to be educated:
Body image and the integrated self
The word Ida and her colleagues used for the integrated inner conception was *body image*. The term arrived in the Open Universe lectures of 1974 by way of educational psychology — the gestalt that holds all the partial selves together into something that can respond as a unit. Ida treated body image as both indispensable and dangerous. Indispensable, because without it there is no coherent self to send into an experience. Dangerous, because once fused, the body image becomes the filter through which all subsequent experience is screened, including the experience of one's own body. In the 1974 Open Universe class, she walks the audience through the developmental psychology of how this fusion happens around ages five to seven, and what it then does to every later perception.
"We have a body image and that image is the product of experiences we've had with our body through our five senses and these become integrated into a whole thing and we carry that body image around with it with us."
Ida, in the 1974 Open Universe class, defining body image as the gestalt of remembered bodily experience:
Ida's diagnosis is that the body image is often one of the most destructive things a person carries — deprecating, outdated, fused at age six and never revised. Yet it must exist, because it is what integrates the otherwise scattered partial selves into a responding whole. The practice does not abolish the body image; it disrupts it enough that revision becomes possible. The first two minutes of the first hour, Ida observed, already blow one of the strongest cultural assumptions — that bodies don't change except to get old. Once that assumption cracks, the body image is forced to update.
"This is the this was the question that I asked. That just the very fact that a body can change shape within thirty minutes, you know, or two minutes really, is a tremendous cultural assumption. The kind of thing you're talking about, bodies don't change except they get old would be another way to put in that test. You see? That one is a a very strong one in our subconscious, I think, and that one is blown, you know, in the first two minutes of raw."
Ida, in the Open Universe class, on the cultural assumption that the first session of work immediately disrupts:
Limiting body ego to reach deeper consciousness
If the body image is the filter, then there are levels of bodily experience that the filter excludes. This is the most demanding claim in Ida's embodiment doctrine — and the one that brings her closest to her colleagues who were working on consciousness and energy fields in the same period. Our physical senses, she argues in the 1974 Open Universe lectures, tell us very little about our bodies. They tell us about the surface. But the body has capacities — molecular action, mitotic rhythm, hormonal flux, electrodynamic change — that go on continuously without ever reaching ordinary awareness. To experience that level, the body ego and body image have to be limited and minimized. Not abolished — limited. The fused gestalt that gets us through the supermarket has to be set aside for a different kind of attending.
"In order to experience this level of consciousness and molecular action we have to limit and minimize body ego and body image. We do not reach that level of consciousness in the level of reality which we're commonly working. We have to open this in order to have that capacity to educate ourselves physically."
Ida in the 1974 Open Universe class, on what has to give way for deeper bodily experience to become available:
The practical mechanism by which the work loosens the body image is, in Ida's account, the disruption of static thought-forms held in the tissue itself. Belief systems live in fascia. The thought that the body is fixed, that it changes only with aging, that the body one has is the body one is stuck with — these are not held only in the mind. They are held as static patterns in the connective tissue web. When the tissue becomes plastic, the belief system becomes plastic too. This is the channel Ida claims is unique to the work.
"And it is through this channel that I think Rolfi makes a tremendous contribution. It is not one that is easily evaluated in our laboratories. This is why I think there is a more permanent change to this kind of education than there is to track and field.
Ida, in the same 1974 Open Universe lecture, on the unique channel through which the work contributes:
Inside the body: feel where you are
When Ida wanted to teach embodiment directly, she stopped lecturing and asked the room to do something. The 1976 Boulder advanced class contains one of the few surviving recordings of her giving an explicit embodiment instruction — not as theory but as exercise. She had been talking about a dancer named Ruth St. Denis who wrote in her diary that she could not dance well because she could not find her center line. The phrase caught Ida. A dancer who understood that her job was to get her body working around a vertical line was talking about the same problem Ida was teaching from a different direction. Ida then asked the room to stand and feel where they were.
"Get yourself comfortable and feel where you are in that body. You don't accept your head as being you. Seal at centerline if you can that Ruth was looking for."
Ida in the 1976 Boulder advanced class, asking the room to stand and locate themselves inside the body:
The instruction is small but doctrinally enormous. *You don't accept your head as being you* — that is, the default location of self-experience for the modern Western person is in the head, and that default is wrong. The center line runs through the structural middle of the body, not through the cranium where the eyes and mouth and the running commentary live. Ida then walked the class through the experiential evidence: shift the weight to the outer arches and the center line dissolves; turn the toes up and the line re-establishes. The body image, in other words, can be tested against structural fact in real time. The two are not necessarily in alignment, and the work of embodiment is partly the work of bringing them back together.
"Anyone want to argue it? Now when you try to teach me about my business and tell me that weight should go down on the three center toes, Feel what the experimental data is behind that statement. Your center line connects down the inside of the leg. Your center line is destroyed as weight goes on to the outer arch. Now just turn your toes up and see how that begins to put the weight back again into the center line. See what you begin to feel as you begin to feel the establishment of that center line."
Ida, continuing the same instruction, walking the class through what disrupts and what restores the center line:
Energy fields and the receptive body
Ida's late teaching pushed the embodiment question past the body image into territory that her more conservative colleagues found uncomfortable. If the body image is the gestalt of experiences received through the five senses, then the five senses themselves become the limit. And in the 1974 Open Universe lectures, Ida went on record saying that the five senses are grossly limiting — that the structural nature of the senses excludes most of what comes to the body. The connective tissue, the great web that supports the body, she proposed as the receiver for what the five senses cannot register. This is the most speculative point in her embodiment doctrine and the one she flagged as a hunch she could not yet back up.
"But there is this vast array of information which comes to us which has come to me which cannot be described in terms of the five senses. There are limitations which exist within the structure of the central nervous system in the transportation of messages. I don't care how exhaustive it is. And I think there are limitations in the processing in the brain. Well, I think it is through the senses, the brain, the central nervous system that our system is closed. And what I believe is that the dynamic energy fields are received through possibly the acupuncture spots, which exist all over the body. There are many many many thousands hundreds."
Ida in the 1974 Open Universe class, naming what she suspects the connective tissue actually does:
Valerie Hunt was the colleague who took this hunch into the laboratory. Her electromyographic and aura-measurement studies, presented at the 1974 Healing Arts conference, gave Ida the empirical company she had been wanting for a decade. Hunt's finding that incoming clients tended to have auras a half-inch to an inch wide, and that after the ten-session series their auras typically increased to four or five inches, gave the energy-field claim something it had not previously had — measurement. Ida cited this finding repeatedly in 1974-1976 as evidence that what the work was changing was not only the contour of the body but the field around it.
"It appears to me that there are either two forms of energy human energy that we now know, or there are two aspects of one form of energy: One being primarily electrical, that which is inside the body. The other I don't know whether it's by the process of structural integration they become transducers, whether it's the people of that are chosen to be Ralfords or whether Ida Zapsums. But I'm sure they're transducers and it is a relationship between two people that makes what happens happen. It is in addition to the technique."
Valerie Hunt at the 1974 Healing Arts conference, summarizing what she takes the work to be doing at the level of energy:
What Hunt added to Ida's doctrine was the relational dimension. Embodiment, in this widened account, is not a private project of the inhabitant working alone on their own body image. It is a relational fact — the body opens, registers, and reorganizes in the presence of another energy field that is itself organized. This is why, Hunt said, it matters whether the client loves their practitioner. The technique can be the same; the transduction is not. Ida picked this up and used it freely in her late lectures, and it gave her the language to say what the practice had always been doing — meeting one embodied person with another, the field of one entering the field of the other.
The body as algebraic sum of energies
Underneath the body image and the energy-field claims, Ida held a stricter, more physical account of what the body actually is. It is, she said repeatedly through the public tapes, a summation of energies — the algebraic sum of every organ, every system, every joint, each operating as its own small energy unit. What we feel when we say *I feel* is the running balance of that algebra. This is a more austere version of embodiment than the body-image account but it sits underneath it as the substrate. The reason the inner conception can author the body is that the body, at the energetic level, is already a sum that any input can shift.
"And every time you use the word structural integration, You are talking about the relationship between various gross, unitary parts that fit together to make the aggregate that we call the man. Now many of you are aware of the fact that the various parts of the body operate on energy, with energy, by energy, creating their own energy, taking in their own energy. They are individual energy machines. And according to you add these energy machines, appropriately or inappropriately. You get addition or subtraction from the energy machine as a whole. If you've got a liver structure that's functioning very badly, the rest of your body which might be doing reasonably well, you are taking away the energy from it to keep that liver going and the answer is you don't feel so well. Because what you are registering when you say I feel is the sum total of that energy. But remember that sum total is an algebraic sum. Some of those systems are going to be pluses and some of them are going to be minuses unless you are very well stacked. Now you can add to that energy by the stopping. If you set those blocks properly, you can get maximum efficiency in the way that the body works."
Ida in the 1973 Big Sur advanced class, on the body as a sum of energy machines:
The image of stacking is central here. Ida used the word *blocks* deliberately, against the protest of students who wanted a more biological vocabulary. The blocks are the head, thorax, pelvis, legs — and the operative question of embodiment is whether they are stacked so that the gravitational field flows through them, or stacked badly so that gravity is something the body has to fight. The body that fights gravity loses the fight slowly across a lifetime. The body that accepts gravity is, in her phrase, nourished by it. This is why she insisted that gravity is the therapist.
"of the earth for support, for enhancement. See, the random body is such that gravity cannot work through it. The field that surrounds the earth can not work through it. It has to work against it. And it is not until you get out of this randomness and you organize that body so that it has a model around a vertical that you begin to get a body which can accept the energy of the gravitational field and utilize it. Now, everybody like that definition? Who doesn't? Has anybody got a better one?"
Ida in the 1976 Boulder advanced class, defining what an embodied body actually does with gravity:
The static body and the dynamic body
Ida's late teaching introduced a distinction her earlier work had not made explicit. Embodiment is not only a question of whether the segments are stacked. It is a question of whether the stacking is static or dynamic. The static stacking — head over shoulders over hips over knees over ankles — is what every school of body mechanics teaches as good posture. Ida acknowledged the measuring stick but insisted that the goal lay beyond it. A body that is merely stacked is not yet alive in the field. A body that has become dynamic carries the gravitational wave through its structure as movement. The 1974 IPR lectures contain her clearest statement of this progression.
"And as of today, you are beginning to recognize that it isn't verticality. It's no longer the static, it's the dynamic. Now the problems that, the questions that you bring in and that fall into these two groups, you think that the dynamic is further along the static. It's something has to be added to the static before you get the dynamic. And you've been adding to it in these four hours. The first hour, the eleventh hour so to speak, doesn't add very much dynamic. If you notice what you see is the static improvement of the whole body below the waistline. But that is the road, that is the sort of bridge by which you bridge into the dynamic. Once again, it's the legs you see."
Ida at her August 1974 IPR lecture, on the difference between the static and dynamic body:
The dynamic body is also the body that has begun to use itself differently. Valerie Hunt's electromyographic studies measured the shift directly: after the ten-session series, muscles contracted in sequence rather than in co-contraction, recruitment was smoother, the energy curves were shorter and higher in amplitude. The body, in other words, stopped accelerating and braking at the same time. The technical finding mapped onto something Ida had been saying for years — that the energy output of a properly embodied person becomes specific to the requirement rather than random and global. The whole body is no longer firing for every task.
"Efficiency then with less tension. Another finding: before structural integration, there was what I called widespread excitation, which was unrelated specifically to the particular task at hand. This means, for example, that people write with their bottom, and their bottom gets very tense when they write. And that is not the specific task at hand. After structural integration, the contractions were quite specific to the task. I monitored other areas and found that there was no overflow, that you used those areas of the body that were paramount in accomplishing that particular task, but you did not use all the muscles in the body when these were unnecessary. Again, it constitutes less hyperactivity, less tension, less tension in their muscular system. And it confirms the statement which I've heard Doctor."
Valerie Hunt at the 1974 Healing Arts conference, reporting the electromyographic correlate of dynamic embodiment:
Body and personality cannot be separated
If the body is plastic and is being authored by the inhabitant's inner conception, then the consequence Ida drew was that personality and structure cannot be separated for purposes of treatment. The 1974 Open Universe class contains an exchange in which a questioner — a teacher of general semantics — asked Ida whether the bodily changes of the ten-session series would persist without parallel changes in attitude, assumption, and language. The questioner suspected, reasonably, that without a holistic shift the old patterns would reassert themselves. Ida's answer was characteristic: she conceded that some convictions persist through the work, but she rejected the implicit dualism behind the question.
"Without a holistic, which is an awareness of values, assumptions, language, is it likely that there will be a repetition? Well, would say this, that I'm sure that there are convictions that a person can hold through the series of 10 raw things, which still have a hold on them afterwards. However, what seemed implicit in there, which I don't think happens, is that they're separate, that they don't have a lot of necessary changes in their assumptions, convictions, opinions, and decisions about life as a result of their body changing. This is the this was the question that I asked."
Ida in the 1974 Open Universe class, answering Doctor Hayakawa on whether body change persists without parallel attitudinal change:
Fritz Perls, working at Esalen in the years when Ida was building the early student cohort, picked this up immediately. The insight quoted Ida often — *you just can't believe the insights I have had since I have been working with them.* What Perls noticed was that the work did not need to be supplemented by talking therapy to produce psychological reorganization, because the structural reorganization was itself the psychological reorganization. The personality, in this account, is not a layer sitting on top of the body. It is the way the body is being authored from inside. Change the structure and the authorship has different material to work with.
So This question. I'd like to quote Doctor. Hunt directly here, so I'm looking for my notes. As those two energy fields parallel one another, it is then that gravity becomes a supportive factor. As the nervous and glandular fields of the man are less bedeviled by gravity, the man apparently changes. His behavior changes. The man, we might say, becomes more human. He differentiates more. He feels more. He feels his own mental processes as being less confused, as being more adequate. He suddenly feels himself as the subject of more and more important insights. This is what Fritz Perls used to say about structural integration."
Ida at the 1974 Open Universe class, quoting Valerie Hunt on what happens to the person as the energy fields parallel one another:
The first hour as entry into embodiment
How does a person actually get inside their body when the work begins? Ida's answer was structural, not psychological. The first hour does not aim at the deep places. It frees the thorax from the pelvis and the legs from the pelvis so that the pelvis becomes available — and once the pelvis is available, the rest of the series can do its work. The first hour, in her phrase, is the beginning of the tenth. Every later session is a continuation of what the first one opened. Embodiment, in the work, is built sequentially. You cannot skip into the dynamic body; you have to start by giving the pelvis room.
"What does matter is you understand you have to lift that up off the pelvis to start getting mobility in the pelvis. Uh-huh. The first hour is the beginning of the tenth hour. Okay? Uh-huh. The second hour is a follow-up of the first hour. Uh-huh. It's just the second half of the first hour. Okay? And the third hour is the second half of the second and first hour. It's literally a continuation. I clearly I clearly saw, you know, last summer that continuation process and how and, you know, Dick talked about how, you know, the only reason it was broken into 10, you know, sessions like that was it because the body just couldn't take all that work."
Ida in the 1975 Boulder advanced class, naming the sequential structure of how the work enters the body:
The senior student in that exchange, working out the doctrine in real time, named what most practitioners eventually realize — that what Ida did was sit and watch bodies, and that the recipe came from the watching. She integrated her life toward understanding Structural Integration. The work is not a technique applied to bodies; it is a way of attending to bodies that, over fifty years, became formalized into a sequence. Embodiment, in the practitioner's hands, is therefore also a discipline of attention. You cannot give what you have not yourself become.
"I would like to just say a few words about the relationship of practitioner to Ralphie and what's going on in private practice when you're working with people and some of the pitfalls that you're probably going to run into and maybe some other ways and some ways you can avoid the hard experiences. It seems that in the attempt to see a body, one of the things that we do is to project our awareness toward another being. We look, we reach out with our senses and our awareness and try to cognize what's going on with that other person when you're trying to evaluate what you're going to do in terms of structural integration. You're watching someone move around and you start putting your hands on their body and you've seen what you see and you start to act upon what you've evaluated. Invariably, you're going to run into the person's persona when you start trying to modify their body pattern. That's one of the first things that emerges is that the personality starts to manifest more strongly."
A senior student in the 1975 Boulder advanced class, naming the relational reality of the work:
The energy body and the physical body
Ida's late teaching pushed at the boundary between the physical body and what she sometimes called the energy body or the pattern body. The distinction was tentative — she did not have settled language for it — but the working idea was that there are two bodies, or one body operating on two levels, and that ordinarily they are matched. When something goes wrong, the matching fails. This is what certain seers, she said, see as holes in the aura. The practitioner's work, in her account, is partly to bring the physical body onto the pattern body — not, as one might assume, the other way around.
"But you see, as you work with bodies, you get a certain reality on the fact that there are various bodies, like a body of awareness and like a three-dimensional cellular body. And that sometimes these bodies, so to speak, can literally be superimposed one on the other, that can be perfectly matched within their patterns one or the other. And that when something goes wrong in the body, this matching falls apart. This is what these some of these mediums see. That this other body, this energy body, this whatever you wanna call it body, isn't matching. It doesn't have the right relation to the physical body, and this I is what you are doing here. You're putting the physical body on the pattern body and not the pattern body on the physical body. And particularly well, no. I don't think this is true."
Ida in the RolfA3 public tape, describing the relationship between the physical body and the pattern body:
The twelfth dorsal vertebra came up in her August 1974 IPR lecture as the structural location where the two-body relation became most visible. The twelfth dorsal is the center of innervation for almost everything below the head — digestion, elimination, reproduction, the kidneys, the adrenals, the spleen. When it works, the systems it innervates have access to their own energy source. When it breaks down, everything downstream breaks down too, including the adrenal supply that fuels the whole organism. The body, viewed from the twelfth dorsal outward, is not a container with cubbyholes but a center radiating through the fascial planes.
"You have to be able to measure these things before it goes into the textbooks. So once again, we're up against it. We need money. Let's not worry about it this morning. But I hope that from what I've been stressing about the middle, this core structure, I hope you're beginning to understand that you can get this different idea of a body as a something centered going out instead of something contained in the skin with some cubbyholes in it. Because I do not think that the very essential understanding of the different role of human beings is going to come out until somebody does some heavy thinking about how this thing can be a center of something that is reaching out in every direction through the fascial planes. Okay. If I can just make one more point, one concept of the old fascial thing that we've not really given much thought to is that there is also fascial coverings of all the organs. The kidneys, the intestines and so forth. All of which continuous with this kind of fascia that I'm talking about in the muscles."
Ida in her August 1974 IPR lecture, on the body as a center radiating outward through the fascial planes:
Asking the practitioner to become embodied
The doctrine of embodiment, in Ida's classroom, was not only addressed to clients. It was addressed to the practitioner first. The 1976 Boulder advanced class contains some of her most direct statements about what she expected from her students — not technical competence but the integration of one's own life around the work. She named it specifically in conversation with a senior student: what Ida had done was integrate her own life toward understanding Structural Integration, and what she was teaching the room was that same discipline. You cannot give what you have not yourself become. Embodiment, for the practitioner, is therefore not a topic of study but a way of organizing one's existence.
"She just Ida what Ida did is what she's trying to teach how to do, and that is that you have to stay within your your trade. You have to make structural integration in your life. She integrated her life towards understanding structural integration. And she still does that. And she's still Her body is still her her whole being is integrated towards into structural integration. Being structurally integrated herself, structurally integrating us, the guild, the teaching process, and people per se. And to me, word spectrum really comes to mind here. We're not only taking people along the spectrum of life, we're taking them on a very special spectrum. You can't be wishy washy about this."
A senior student in the 1975 Boulder advanced class, articulating what Ida was asking of the practitioners:
This is why Ida was severe about the practitioner who let the client's agenda redirect the work. People, she observed, would come in wanting their heads straightened out, wanting an emotional release, wanting the practitioner to leave the structural path and follow them down whatever trip they were on. Every time the practitioner got *wishy-washy* and followed, the work failed both of them. The structural path is what gives the inner reorganization its scaffolding. Without the structure, there is nothing for the body image to update against.
"And some of those old words were pretty good. If you consider that in the joints, have the proprioceptors that have to relate back to the central nervous system. We were doing fifth hours last. Yeah. And I think you people be a lot better off if you don't try to get yourself swinging into the nervous system but do keep yourselves being aware of the differences in tension and compression, if you want to say that, within the myofascial myo no myofascial tissue."
Ida in the 1975 Boulder advanced class, on the discipline of attention the practitioner must develop:
Coda: the more human use of human beings
Ida borrowed her summary phrase from Norbert Wiener — *a more human use of human beings*. It was the formulation she returned to when she wanted to name what the work was ultimately for. Not the correction of pathology, not the alignment of segments, not even the opening of energy fields, but the production of a person who could use themselves more fully because they were finally and continuously inside the body they were authoring. The advanced class of 1976 in New Jersey gave her, she said, the evidence that this was reachable — that the work, when taught well, was closer to that goal than it had been a year earlier.
"Now it is not merely the knowledge of anatomy or anatomical facts, not even facial anatomy and its facts. It is the voluntary creation of a man nearer to the goal signified by Norbert Weiner, and most of you have heard me say this before, a more human use of human beings. This is our goal, to create that kind of a man. And this goal I feel is mirrored, decidedly nearer than it was even a year ago. And if you think I have been too freely imbibing of that nectar that they have up on Cloud 9, it would be an idea to talk to some of the more recent advanced students and see how they feel about what their ability is to see and to work at this point. So as I say, we are bragging."
Ida in the IPR conference recording, naming the ultimate goal of the work:
Ida's introduction at her 1974 Structure Lectures opens with the line of her own life — born and raised in New York, Barnard PhD in 1916 as a research chemist, Rockefeller Institute hire, the Zurich lectures of Schrödinger in the late 1920s that first suggested to her that human behavior was directly related to body physics and body chemistry. The biographical frame matters here because embodiment is, in her account, autobiographical as well as theoretical: she spent fifty years organizing her own life toward the question, and the doctrine emerged out of that organization, not out of a literature.
"Good I'm delighted to be able to be here with you and to give you some firsthand hints about Actually, anything that anybody can present to you about Rolfing is necessarily a hint because Rolfing itself is an experience and like all experiences to create it to translate it into verbal sections words doesn't really convey ideas. But at any rate, I'll do a little something toward talking about Rolfing at this point. Now, Rolfing, have already heard something of the genesis of Rolfing and how it came about."
Ida opening her 1974 Structure Lectures, naming the limits of language for what the work is:
What this leaves the reader with is a doctrine of embodiment that operates at four levels simultaneously. At the molecular level, collagen bonds are interchangeable and the body is therefore plastic. At the structural level, the segments can be stacked so that gravity flows through rather than against them. At the level of body image, the inner conception authors the material form moment by moment, and the work disrupts the static thought-forms that hold an outdated body image in place. At the energetic level, the field around the body widens, the connective tissue becomes more receptive, and the person becomes more accurate to themselves. None of these levels is separable. The body that becomes more vertical also becomes more dynamic, also acquires a wider field, also authors itself from a more current inner conception. To be embodied, in Ida's full account, is to be all four at once.
See also: See also: Ida Rolf in the 1976 Boulder advanced class (76ADV28), on the practitioner's struggle to see peripherally rather than in tunnel vision — relevant to the discipline of attention that the embodiment doctrine requires of the practitioner. 76ADV281 ▸
See also: See also: the RolfB6 public tape, on the first-hour pelvic lift as the entry to the structural opening on which all subsequent embodiment work depends. RolfB6Side1a ▸
See also: See also: the 1973 Big Sur advanced class (SUR73 series), where Ida develops the doctrine that the body is a summation of energies and that structure is always relationship in space. SUR7301 ▸SUR7332 ▸